I’ve been finding ChatGPT increasingly useful lately, both because ChatGPT is useful and because Google search feels like it’s been in decline.

I’m not a coder. At all. I probably have slightly better understanding than the average non-coder, but looking at code tends to make my eyes glaze over. I’m typically good with the logic of what I want to happen, but the syntax and simply knowing what functions are available are things I really struggle with.

A few days ago, I decided I wanted to make a somewhat simple script. I spent several hours trying things, googling for solutions to the problems I encountered, and ultimately I got nowhere. Yesterday, I decided I should give ChatGPT a go. Not only did I get ChatGPT to write the entire script for me, with me just giving it prompts on what I wanted it to do, but it managed to explain pretty much everything it was doing - with answers tailored to my exact code. When things didn’t work, it could speculate on why it might not have worked, and try alternative solutions.

It was a fairly collaborative process. There were points where I could see things that ChatGPT hadn’t caught, like certain lines of code that had become unnecessary after iterating, or that variables hadn’t been defined properly, and I could point then out and it’d fix them.

Using ChatGPT isn’t entirely the same as googling for information, but I think you have to take a fairly similar approach with how you use both. Your language has to be precise and clear, you need to have an understanding of what output you want, and how to tailor your input to achieve that output. And you need to understand how to use the output it gives you - sometimes it’ll be wrong, or only partial. Sometimes it’ll require further steps to get the final result you’re looking for.